My New Work From Home Office

It’s easy to get complacent, so every new year I like to look over everything I’m doing to see if it can be improved. Budgets, fitness, business strategy, personal goals, and weekly routines all get a review.

One area I found needed some improvement was my home office. I work a lot from home, and my former space wasn’t cutting it. It was too close to our living area, so there was too much noise, and I always had random papers and mail strewn about my desk.

Everyone’s ideal office is going to look different, but my main goal was to create a functional space free of distraction. No more clutter, no more noise, and a lot more open space.

The Desk

The most important piece of any office is the desk. I decided to replace my old desk and bought a motorized standing desk from Uplift. They offered a lot of different sized table tops, but none were as deep as I wanted, so I instead attached a 74″ by 42″ ( 188cm x 106.5cm) kitchen island top from Ikea, which was perfect.

I really enjoy being able to switch from sitting to standing, and because it can record presets for 4 different heights, it makes switching very quick. I’ve now been using it for almost 2 months, and I’m really happy with it.

The Credenza

Next up was conquering my clutter problem. In my old office, I kept a lot of the stuff I was working on on top of my desk. It continued to pile up, and I needed a better solution. I ended up choosing the Line File Credenza from Design Within Reach. On the function side, it has a ton of storage space; the top drawers keep all of the stuff I’m currently working on or things that need to be filed. I keep all of my camera equipment in the middle open section, and the two bottom drawers are both set up to hold hanging files.

As with anything from Design Within Reach, it’s built really well. It’s one of the more expensive pieces I have, but I fully expect it to last my lifetime.

Art

Next, my office had a big bare wall I needed to cover. I could have gone with a simple painting or some picture frames, but I wanted something unique. In my search, I came across a company called WoodSnap, who can imprint your photos into wood. They have a lot of different sizes and shapes to print on, but I went with the 12″ (30.5cm) hexagons for a more unique look.

Each piece comes pre-cut in the back to make hanging really easy. The hard part was getting them on the wall evenly spaced. I’m pretty handy with Adobe Illustrator, so I ended up creating a layout of exactly how I liked them, the printed off a full size template I hung on the wall. Here’s the image you can print off if you’re interested in doing the same thing.

Floor

To finish it off, I have a 9′ by 12 ‘ (2.75m x 3.6m) sisal rug from Jaipur Living. The design is more manly than many of the rugs I found, it has a really grippy rubber backing to keep it from slipping, and Jaipur makes some great rugs, so I know it will last.

Mistakes

I did make one mistake in setting up my new office. I bought a new 27″ curved monitor, and didn’t realize it didn’t have VESA mounts (the universal 4 hole square area on the back of most monitors). I initially wanted to have it mounted on a movable arm attached to my desk, so I could position better on my desk, but without the VESA mounts, it wasn’t possible. The monitor sat lower than I liked, so I bought a wood wine rack and re-purposed it as you can see in the photo. It’s not ideal, but it works fine.

Hope you enjoyed the tour. See you on the next post.

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